Redflags
First reader-suggested story in a while and we love to publish those, so keep’em coming! Harry Markopolos (the Bernie Madoff whistle-blower we posted about on March of last year) is back at it with a quick and scathing article on Business Week. Many ways to look at it, but we highlight three in our post. We also like that he doesn’t deny that genius exists, it’s just that he assumes fraud “until genius is proven” and advocates thorough investigation.
This 2008 article discusses red flags for Board members trying to detect fraud. For us the article doesn’t give nearly enough emphasis to incentives, but to correct that we’re linking to our Q4 2008 report excerpts. It’s vital to remember that one shouldn’t rely on checklist approaches to CG, fraud, stock research and pretty much anything else involving “systems” that are far from simple.
There’s lots of interesting content in Amazon.com’s launch page for “No One Would Listen”, a book by the main whistleblower in the Bernie Madoff saga. The timeline in particular is very impressive: it shows that it took ten years to uncover the mess – nine since the first contact with the SEC – by which time the problem was irreversible. And that’s far from the only case, which begs a question… How do we justify still having institutions supposed to keep watch so unready and unwilling to investigate red flags?
